Chapter Text
Jake’s car drove as beautifully as it looked.
He’d hustled her outside as soon as he could manage, escaping when Bob finally got enough shots into Phoenix to get her onstage so she couldn’t corner either of them about anything. They’d slipped quietly out the front door of the bar without a word, and it was then when Nana finally cracked and laughed her ass off, giggling all the way to the driver’s side door.
She didn’t know what else to do. She had no idea what had just happened, let alone how to process it without sounding like a fool. So, she just giggled, and Jake laughed too, and it was almost as though they hadn’t fought their way to get to this point when Jake handed her his keys, two tiny ones attached to a keychain shaped like a cowboy hat. Much like the one he was still wearing, which he unceremoniously tossed in his messy backseat.
Of fucking course.
Adjusting the seat so her short ass could reach the pedals was a bitch, but they got there, and Nana had never been happier she’d learned to drive in an aging Jeep as she pulled out of that parking lot, feeling an immense amount of power under her hands as she listened to Jake talk.
She wondered what it would feel like to take the Thunderbird up the PCH, to just cruise and let the wind whip through her hair, thinking about nothing but the road and the person next to her. It was a dream out of a ‘60s film, a Malibu Rising -esque fantasy she indulged herself in as she drove, listening to Jake hum along to the Kenny Loggins song on the radio. She could see it so clearly in her head, and maybe Jake could too, the way he looked over at her right as she tried to convince herself it was stupid.
“You gonna go back home when this is all over?” he asked. “Back to Detroit?”
He had to shout to be heard over the wind and the sound of the radio, and Nana imagined that’s what it might be like to hear him up in the air, over those crackling radios when he was breaking the speed of sound.
He sounded just a tiny bit melancholy, and she wondered how he’d managed to so perfectly echo the feeling in her heart that blossomed at his question.
“Probably for a while,” she replied as quietly as she could, over the crooning sound of This Is It . “I have some local work waiting for me.”
Local work was really code for staying long enough in the apartment she still paid rent on that the landlord wouldn’t kick her out , but that wasn’t Jake’s problem. Not that he would’ve cared anyway, the way he chased her words with his own, brain too desperate to get his thoughts out.
“That any better or worse than hanging around a bunch of pilots every day?”
The melancholy was still there, and Nana wondered if it was just the comedown from the idiotic stunt Jake had pulled. The crash from both the alcohol and the adrenaline.
“Better weather here,” she replied. “Debatable about the company though.”
She leaned over to sock him gently on the arm, and he feigned like she’d cracked him hard, and god, why was he so good at making her laugh when she didn’t want to? She just giggled and giggled and giggled, and it was like she couldn’t control it. Like she was seeing herself through the haze of a high, enjoying the ride but not entirely able to influence where it went.
She had no fucking clue where she was headed, just staying on the same road as she listened to Jake hum and tell bad stories about kicking Rooster’s ass in dogfight training. She couldn’t tear her attention away from his voice, the easy way it came out of him now that he was sober enough to stop putting on a show.
He was a storyteller, that much was obvious from the way he peacocked around everyone he knew. But this — this quiet confidence, without all the bravado she was used to? She’d’ve driven all the way down to Mexico just to hear it all night.
At some point, she stopped worrying about the road and cruised until it felt right, pulling off the highway and down onto a beach road, one of the many that littered the coast. She had no clue where they were, if they were near North Island or if they’d passed it, but it was calmer wherever it was. Still filled with tourists, but no boardwalk. Just couples and families, strolling down an endless expanse of white sand.
Jake had sobered up a bit by the time they parked the car, and the glassy look in his eyes had cleared up by the time he clambered out, asking what direction Nana thought they should go. She wanted to chase the sun that was slowly setting the longer they stood there, so that was the direction they went. Towards something that stood even half a chance at outshining Jake in that moment.
He slipped an arm around her waist once she’d discarded her heels, and she let him, felt the weight against her skin as he settled in. He kept it at a respectable height, and she almost leaned into it, pressing her shoulder against his as they walked. He smelled like sunblock and Bud Light and that minty gun he’d been chewing that Coyote insisted help prevent hangovers. He’d grabbed some on the way out the door, right around the same time Rooster had shot her a wink she could only describe as smug, like he’d known how things were going to end all along.
She made a mental note to kick his ass on Monday morning.
The sand was soft under her bare feet, and the sound of the ocean — the same ocean she’d had roaring outside her window for just around a month — seemed to calm the nerves that were still burning just under her skin. She’d read something ages ago about the white noise being able to do that, the simple presence of something so powerful setting off a dopamine response in people’s brains.
Maybe that was bullshit, but she could feel something warm settling underneath her skin now. Something diffused and calm. It was a sharp turnaround from how she’d been feeling at the bar, and she wondered if maybe all her adrenaline had suddenly crashed and made her slightly too calm. If she’d had such an aggressive response to a boy showing interest in her in front of his friends and a bar full of strangers that she’d dissociated.
It didn’t feel like dissociation, in any case. Not the way she was keenly aware of Jake’s hand on her waist, keeping their shoulders in line as he glanced out at the ocean.
“The karaoke was Mav’s idea, just so you know.”
He directed the statement at the rolling waves, rather than Nana’s face, but she frowned anyway.
“ Mav’s idea?”
Karaoke aside, she couldn’t possibly imagine Pete Mitchell, who came off more like a dad than her own father, suggesting date ideas to his fellow co-pilots — at least, not without also slipping them a condom and giving them a deeply embarrassing talk about responsibility.
But more importantly: why the fuck had Jake asked Mav about where to take her on a date?
Said date only nodded, seemingly unbothered about the idea of crowdsourcing date ideas from pilots almost thirty years his senior.
“Said he used to do it when he was my age,” he mused. “Or something similar, down at that O-Bar. You know that one down the road from Penny’s?”
Nana nodded. It was the only other Navy bar she’d seen in town, the one that (apparently) all the older admirals drank at when they wanted to get away from the chaos of the younger officers at the Hard Deck. They watered down the beer, according to Hondo.
“You recruited your co-pilot to help you plan a date?”
She couldn’t get the question out of her head, so she let it slip. It had become painfully obvious that the whole serenade had been a group effort, but to what degree, Nana didn’t quite understand.
“No.”
Jake shook his head, finally looking away from the sea and back to her.
“But I am open to suggestions.”
If you’d’ve asked her two weeks ago, Nana would’ve said Jake Seresin was the least “receptive to feedback” person she knew. He did things how and when he wanted to, fuck everyone else. Don’t think, just do, or whatever that mantra was that Mav drilled into his pilots week after week.
But two weeks was a long time for someone to change.
Or open up.
“And I needed the moral support if I was going to go on a real date with the prettiest woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
She figured it was the latter.
“Is that why your definition of a date was hanging out with your coworkers, like I have a million times since you weaseled my number out of me?”
She despised how much the question sounded like an accusation the moment it was out of her mouth. She hadn’t meant it that way, not really. She’d meant to sound teasing, cutesy, like so many girls she’d grown up with had mastered. She wanted to be coy and hard to get, but instead her words came out flat and creased around the edges.
She’d’ve like to admit that she didn’t know why that had happened. She could’ve easily blamed it on the drinks, or her nerves, or any number of factors that had complicated her relationship with Jake thus far. They might have been plausible responses, things that could get a normal person off her back.
But she knew, deep down inside, why she’d actually sounded like that.
She was jealous .
She could feel her heart doing backflips in her chest, and she hoped the way Jake was still cradling her to his side didn’t make that fact entirely obvious. If it did, he had the grace not to say anything — or even react to the venom that had poisoned her words.
He only gave her a soft smile, one that didn’t entirely reach his eyes. The polite southern kind, that was more about keeping your real feelings tempered than it was being genuine. What those feelings were, Nana had no idea, and she was too scared — yes, scared — to make any attempt at figuring it out.
“Okay, one, you’re the one who did the weaseling,” he said teasingly. “My wallet still hasn’t recovered from that stunt of yours.”
His hand flexed against her waist as that tiny smile grew. It reached his eyes now, opening a door Nana was certain her accidental vitriol had slammed shut, and if it was possible to choke on air, she managed it.
“And two, my first instinct was to do the whole wine and dine thing, take you out and make you feel pretty.”
He used the hand that wasn’t still sitting firmly against her waist to wave up and down her torso, gesturing to the dress currently being whipped about by seaside wind.
“Which, clearly, didn’t have to try too hard. Fuck me.”
He let out a low whistle, and suddenly Nana’s complexion matched the rosy pink of her outfit.
I mean, if you’re asking…
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” she muttered, eyes dropping to the sand. Jake slowed the two of them to a stop, and tugged her into his side with the hand at her waist.
“That was my point, yes.”
His voice, for the briefest of seconds, was low and dark, but it faltered out at the end, went up instead of down. It wavered, in a way the voice of a prestigious naval aviator shouldn’t.
“Well, not my point, but you get what I mean.”
The words tripped off his tongue quickly, more tangled than she’d ever heard something come out of his mouth. Someone had knotted his shoelaces together during recess and he was struggling to walk, in the metaphorical sense, leaving Nana to furrow her brow at the sound of his voice.
He’s rambling.
Jake “Hangman” Seresin, the one who always seemed to have a comeback on hand, was rambling, talking like he couldn’t figure out where his words were going. Like he’d lost track of them and couldn’t find his way back.
Like he needed someone to lead him out of the forest, and that someone was her.
“So why didn’t you?”
Nana’s words were hesitant — reserved, lest she accidentally sound like a bitch again. She stepped carefully, holding one manicured hand out to that wavering voice that she wanted to hear more of. The one that belonged to the Jake that had insisted on driving her home before things had gone south, that had looked like a kicked puppy when she’d even mentioned the idea of hanging around Mav.
Much like she had weeks ago, she wanted to pull every last detail out of him. Stand on that beach until she’d gotten the full answer to her questions, even if her legs wanted to give out from under her. She wanted to listen, to know him and everything that was rolling around in that giant (probably still tipsy) head of his.
She slipped out of his grasp, forcing herself out of the childish desire to stay glued to his side forever. The sand was warm and slippery under her feet, and she had to put all of her focus into not collapsing into a pile of tulle and polyester at his feet.
That amount of focus meant she didn’t look at his face until it was right in front of hers, too close for comfort and yet not close enough at all. The smile had melted from his face, and there was a crease in the center of his brow from where he’d furrowed it. It looked wrong on him, an imperfection on an otherwise perfect face. He wasn’t meant for those kinds of expressions, and only his words kept Nana from acting on the desire to wipe it off his face.
“Because I chickened out.”
He said it with all the confidence he would anything else — like he was bragging about breaking some flight record rather than admitting something embarrassing to her. His voice didn’t match his face, and if she hadn’t known better, Nana would’ve wondered if it were at all possible for him to sound unsure about something.
“Didn’t think Jake Seresin was capable of chickening out.”
She did better at sounding coy that time, poking him gently in the chest with one finger.
He was so… solid. There was a better word for it, somewhere in Nana’s brain, she knew there was, but she couldn’t think of it as she drew her hand away, thinking better of it before she acted on what little alcohol was left in her system to flatten her palm against the buttons of his shirt. Feels the muscles that moved under it as he chuckled, a flat, lifeless kind of a thing.
“I think Phoenix is the only woman I know who takes even less shit from guys than you do.”
He shook his head, and Nana couldn’t help it — she snorted at the look on his face, which had morphed into something between wonderment and brotherly annoyance.
“Probably because she’s a lesbian,” she mumbled. Jake rolled his eyes, giving her a look that said, Believe me, I found out the hard way.
She added that to her list of things to ask him about.
Her laughter didn’t do much to appease the look on his face, and the gravity of it forced the smile she’d managed downwards until she was frowning too. He was magnetic like that — so much so that Nana couldn’t take her eyes off him as he fidgeted, the stick-straight confidence of a parade march lost after too many drinks.
“I was trying so hard not to act like a dickhead around you that I ended up going the opposite direction.”
He shifted on his feet, the sand beneath them negating some of their aggressive height difference.
“Wanted to give you an out,” he muttered, “Which you’re happy to take after that performance back there, Jesus Christ.”
She watched as he put one hand over his face, and the tiny, embarrassed pieces of him she’d seen up to then all congealed, all spilled out onto his face at once as she watched his expression twist into the closest thing to a grimace she’d ever seen from him. He cringed with his entire body, eyes squeezed shut as his head dropped like his neck couldn’t handle the weight anymore.
For once, Jake Seresin was flustered, and it was adorable .
Nana wondered how many people had ever gotten to see him like this. She knew Coyote had, based on the stories, but she doubted it was an opportunity afforded to many others. They were alike in that sense: good at maintaining a facade, projecting enough energy outwards that it created a force field to protect themselves. Making a character out of their personality, one that could get along with everyone — or, mostly everyone, in Jake’s case.
What about her had broken Jake’s facade, she didn’t know. She was so… normal . She had her sharp edges, for sure, but she didn’t realize they’d caught on any part of him. She wasn’t a standout, not compared to him — TOPGUN graduate, pilot, best that the Navy could offer. Thousand-watt smile and the confidence to match, and every reason to believe that he deserved the good things came to him.
She was just Nana, who said her words backwards and thought boys were cute when they did the same.
“You over-dicked it on accident.”
She shrugged, not enough space between them to do anything else.
“I get it.”
Wow, way to use your words. No wonder you’re a writer.
But really, she didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t know how to comfort him without saying don’t worry, I thought you acting like a complete fool was maybe the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, because clearly I need to get my head checked out. Words didn’t feel like they’d do anything against whatever the fuck was hanging between the two of them, dense as concrete and stiff as a board.
The roar of the ocean was so loud in her ears, preventing her from thinking anything sensible or smooth or even normal at this rate. For a moment, it had been calming, but now it was a white noise machine in her ears, blocking out everything except Jake, Jake, Jake and his stupid blue eyes and his blonde hair and the thought that he’d look really nice with her hands running through it while he—
She stopped that thought before it could leave the station. She was getting ahead of herself.
All she wanted was to get a reaction out of him. Something that wasn’t that frown, that could get them back on the track they’d been on before they’d stubbornly shoved each other apart like a couple of dumbasses. She wanted this to be easy . The kind of easy Jake always seemed to be around everyone except her.
But maybe that wasn’t the point of falling for someone. It isn’t easy — it’s addictive. It’s confusing and strange and not something a person can master. It’s about as dangerous as flying – taking off into an atmosphere where you can’t breathe, praying that the person with you will take care of you until you come back down to earth. If you ever do.
Being with Jake was easy. Falling for him wasn’t.
She glanced down at her hands, the things that had written her a million words. None of those words came to her now, none of the good ones anyway. All she could think about was her nail polish and how soft Jake looked when he wasn’t putting on a face, and how much she never, ever wanted to forget what that looked like.
“But thank God for Mav,” she mumbled, “Or I never would’ve found out about your spectacular karaoke skills.”
She could feel a small smile creeping across her face before she could control it, and something in her heart won gymnastics gold when Jake cringed again, but made no move to step away from her.
“Oughta give you a callsign,” he sighed, “If you’re gonna take to my coworkers so well.”
He caught his lower lip between his teeth, and yeah, maybe she was the kind of girl who swooned over boys. Just for him though.
“They’re nice,” she said casually, voice a little too loud as she tried to drown out the constant parade of his name in her head.
Jake rolled his eyes just as loudly.
“They’re a pain in my ass,” he replied.
“Funny,” Nana mused, “They said the same about you.”
She thumped him gently in the chest with the side of her hand, and before she could withdraw it, Jake had caught her by the wrist again. If he had one move, Nana couldn’t blame him for making it that one, the way it sent her heart racing as he moved until he was holding her hand in his, suspended in the air between them.
His touch was so gentle, she thought, compared to the way it had been at the bar. Back there, it had been weighed down by all the eyes on them, by the expectations and the booze and the heavy, heavy bass of the speakers above their heads. But this? This was tender, like she was some kind of porcelain doll he might chip if he squeezed too hard.
The silence, though? That was heavy. Oppressive, almost. It wasn’t her forte, nor was it his. She wanted to fill it, pad it out with nonsense until she could kickstart the engine that had been fueling their conversations since her place. Anything, she figured, would be better than the way she couldn’t stop thinking about the feeling of his hand in hers, where it kept knocking against the ring she wore on the finger that was supposed to hold an engagement ring.
The silence was deafening, so she filled it.
“Mav told me you saved their lives.”
She could barely hear her own words over the roaring in her ears, almost as loud as the silence itself.
“Well, Rooster’s. And his.”
The words came out like they couldn’t be held back, unleashed from somewhere deep in her chest like a lion from a cage. They didn’t sound like her, more like some disembodied voice from an old Hollywood film. Like Maria, from Metropolis . Like she was metal and her voice didn’t belong to her, but rather someone else — some actress, a girl who didn’t think before she acted, didn’t consider the way that words could be artillery as much as they could be bandages.
She wanted to fill the silence, and so she did, by setting off an atomic bomb.
It occurred to her what she’d said only after the words were out of her mouth. The knowledge she’d admitted to possessing, information that was probably so redacted she could use the files for blackout curtains. A simple slip of the tongue and she’d revealed her entire hand, like a child playing Go Fish at a poker table.
Never had Nana wished more that she could rewind a moment, pull them back into her mouth and forget they existed.
It wasn’t her fault, she’d realized when she thought back on it later. Mav was the one who had volunteered the information, handed it to her on a fucking silver platter. But she’d been the one to parrot it back, and it sent her stomach sinking so fast it may as well have been a bomb.
Jake’s face, meanwhile, was calm, unreadable. Like he’d forgotten his usual confident persona in the car and didn’t know what to do without it. His hand was still holding hers, like it was some kind of foreign object, an alien animal he didn’t dare agitate lest it bite him or sting him or blind him in its fury. She wanted to withdraw hers and cradle his face with it, say I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, I thought you knew, I —
The words died in her throat when Jake shifted, squeezing her hand like it was the last thing connecting him to this earth.
“Did he now?”
The words were so quiet, Nana could’ve cried.
“He did.”
For a brief moment, her mind was back in Maverick’s hanger, as shocked as Jake undoubtedly looked right now. She was back in the middle of that revelation, the thing that had shoved her in the direction of where she stood now. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, she was well aware that that’s what Mav had been doing. He had all the grace of a plane crash, letting the door smack her in the ass on the way out of his hangar and back toward Jake’s stupid fucking car.
Only Fanboy was less subtle than Maverick was, and Nana was at least certain the former was intentional about it.
She could feel herself nodding, see her gaze moving as she did, but her mind wasn’t really in it. She could see her hand slip out of his too, see his hand fall back against his side like dead weight. But her brain was a million miles away, heart caught in her throat as it tried to force words out of her mouth that she wasn’t ready for.
I don’t know how to handle all the good things about you.
I don’t know if I deserve them.
She’d ask about the details of what she’d admitted later — much later. They were important, she knew that, but not right now. There was something much sharper hanging in the air between them that trumped it by a mile. Something in the way Jake was standing, unmoving as though he might shatter if he did. As though her sharp edges had caught on some unseen fragile part of him and cracked something vital. Something only she could fix.
“They like you more than you think.” Her voice was quiet, absorbed by the fabric of Jake’s shirt and the sound of the waves. “I can tell why.”
Something must’ve clicked in Jake’s brain at her words, sliding his features around like pieces of a puzzle at the sound of her words. They clicked like cogs in a machine until he landed on something that made her heart ache in a good way — like the pain that comes with stretching after a long nap, a kind of aching relief.
“Are you admitting that you actually like me, Nana Wilson?”
There was something reverent in the way he’d said her name, and it occurred to Nana that he’d never said her full name like that. He’d called her Miss Wilson to his students, and Susannah in front of Cyclone, but never that name. The name she thought of when she thought of herself. The one she kept close to her heart, right next to where she kept her thoughts about him.
“I know a good man when I see one.” She shrugged again, forcing every ounce of her energy into looking him in the eyes. “Even if he’s a cocky son of a bitch.”
The grin that spread across Jake’s face could’ve outshone the fucking sun.
“You do like me.”
In that instant, between one wave hitting the sand and the next, Nana was fairly certain she’d died and this was heaven.
Jake Seresin, the prettiest boy in the fucking world, and he was standing here looking at her like she’d hung the goddamn moon.
She was going to have a stroke.
Her breath heaved in and out, one big gulp of sea air into her lungs. She needed it, couldn’t go on without it. She couldn’t be normal now, not even the normal she’d been pretending at before. She was on another planet now, her head gauzy like the one and only time she’d smoked a joint in college. If she didn’t breathe, she couldn’t get her next few words out, and she would perish if she hadn’t already.
“Maybe a little.”
Her words sounded sing-song, but maybe that was just the high from being around Jake.
“Hate this fucking shirt though.”
They were close enough that she could pluck at the button-down he had on, with its god-awful, Banana Republic-ass print that overshadowed how good it made his arms look. She was convinced that his uniform shirts were the only attractive ones he actually owned, and that the rest of the time he had to wear these monstrosities to prevent every straight woman in a ten-mile radius from fainting just at the sight of him.
Even then, she was pretty fucking close. Especially considering the way he quirked an eyebrow at her, looking down his nose in a way that— yeah , okay, she was definitely the kind of girl that swooned.
“Is that enough of a sorry excuse for me to take it off?”
His words cut through the gauze in her head, all syrupy and knowing and bringing her back down to reality. She landed with a sharp thunk , struck sharply by the way he was looking at her. He could’ve had one of his stupid regulation boots on her chest and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, the way her chest was heaving – at his words, at the situation, at how goddamn nice he looked despite his hat hair and the sea wind and every other factor at play against them.
He might’ve been looking at her like she was dinner, but he was dessert.
“Finally, he takes a goddamn hint.”
There was the coyness she’d been searching for, flooding her voice in a way she didn’t entirely understand. It was the sudden confidence that came with being attracted to someone, that stripped away everything else in the world that could’ve made her regret her tone. It was just her and him and the very blatant move she’d just made on him — and by the looks of it, the way he was enjoying the shit out of it.
This was a normal thing to do on first dates, right?
If it wasn’t, no one was there to tell them off — and for once, Nana was grateful they were miles away from anyone else who knew them. She’d’ve never been able to live down the way her gaze followed Jake’s hands as they scrambled to undo the buttons on his shirt like it was burning them. She’d’ve evaporated on the spot, and Phoenix would’ve laughed when she had absolutely no idea where the shirt actually ended up, because she was far too busy gaping at the abs that had been hiding under it.
Nope. Not overcompensating. Not even a little bit.
She’d seen his arms in those service khakis, but that was miles away from what she was looking at now, which was about two steps off from obnoxious Abercrombie model, if he’d grown his hair out a little. Something in the back of her mind reminded her of the fitness required to be a pilot, to even meet the physical standards of the Navy, but all those numbers and research flew out of her head the way Mav flew planes at the sight of him.
Yeah. Jake Seresin was fucking cut . Jesus Christ.
She suddenly wished she’d stuffed a bathing suit into her bag that was still in the car, so she could match and look like less of a ditz. She was almost certain they looked like some couple out of a bad cologne ad, standing together the way that they were. She’d moved away only enough for him to pull off his shirt, and something in the air had magnetized them right back together.
Her mind came back around to its thought from earlier at the bar, now that they were this close again.
She’d worn off the tequila, but…
“Are you going to kiss me, or am I going to have to do that for you too?”
She could hardly look him in the eye when she said it, but she managed. It took up all the confidence she had left, throwing her heart open like the bay doors in her rented apartment, letting all his light and sunshine in. She felt like she was tossing herself off a cliff into a void, a stark, deep blackness with only Jake at the end. If he would catch her, she had no idea.
The sarcasm in her voice was certainly hollow with nerves, and she half expected it to bounce off Jake's chest — that she absolutely was not staring at, not at all — and land with a thump in the sand. Nothing made any goddamn sense with him, she was discovering, so the way he pulled his bottom lip between his teeth, face fucking radiant at the sound of her words, made her heart spin and her heart pound with the weight of a thousand drums.
“I can take care of that.”
It occurred to her then that the drinks had brought his accent out, but she didn’t have much time to think on it.
His lips were soft, which somehow made all the sense in the world to Nana, despite his hard exterior. Some place in the back of her brain, some compartment she only ever opened when it was 3AM and she was too drunk to think of the consequences, had expected him to be greedy. Aggressive in claiming what he’d won just like he was in the sky. Forward, as he’d always been since she’d known him.
But he was almost the opposite, at least in the ways she was able to register before his tongue slipped down her throat. He was sweet, that same flustered side of him waiting to see if she approved before he moved any further. She’d’ve screamed yes, you idiot, come on if she’d been at all willing to separate her mouth from his, but she wasn’t, so a tiny squeak and a hand clasped at the back of his neck would have to do.
If she’d said she’d been waiting for this to happen for weeks, it’d be a lie.
She’d been dying for this to happen.
Her head felt too heavy and too light all at the same time, the ocean and the rest of the world going topsy-turvy around her. She was lucky that his hands landed at her waist, the way her knees buckled a little, the gravity of Earth — and of him — suddenly too much for her bare feet to support.
Okay, it had been a while since she’d been kissed, but still.
Fucking hell , he knew what he was doing.
To say it felt right was a cliche Nana would never have been caught dead using as a writer, but in the moment, it was the only thing her brain could conjure. It felt like the right kind of payoff, the result of effort she’d only become aware she’d been putting in less than a week ago. It wasn’t perfect, not with the way their teeth clashed and she snorted and almost certainly smeared her lipstick, but it was so very them , two stubborn people figuring out their way around each other with the smallest amount of compromise possible.
And frankly, if they’d compromised on something as world-bending as this, she’d’ve been pissed.
Any pretense that was left was swept away by the rising tide near their feet, crushed to bits by the way Jake pulled her closer until physics wouldn’t allow him to anymore. (If he could’ve broken those laws and managed more, Nana was certain he would’ve tried. He’d managed more impossible things in a plane.) His hands were warm against her waist, and she pretended she didn’t notice when one slipped down to grab her ass, bunching up the fabric of her dress.
Okay, maybe she did a little bit, the way she gasped into his kiss, much to her own chagrin.
“You bastard.”
She couldn’t even pretend to keep up the sarcasm at this point. Her voice was dripping with sunshine — even more so when Jake laughed, hardly moving his lips away from hers.
“You’re the one who’s not moving, baby.”
He waggled his eyebrows at her with a laugh, and Nana, being the person she was, took it as a challenge. Her body immediately squirmed away from his grip, and she might’ve escaped, had she not been a five-foot-four writer struggling against a six-foot navy pilot with biceps the size of her head on soft, slippery sand.
And if he hadn’t called her baby. That too.
Even then, she was laughing as Jake pulled her back to him, strong arms locking his hips against hers and forcing her arms around his neck before they got crushed between the two of them. She was laughing as he dipped his mouth to her neck, kissing her like they weren’t standing in the middle of the beach with God and the entire La Jolla tourist population watching them.
There were a number of things she’d expected when she’d landed in San Diego weeks before. Sunburn, insomnia, and the string of migraines that always came with extended assignments were at the top of the list. She’d even come to expect Cyclone, and the long hours, and maybe a little bit of sadness at the memory of an admiral she’d never met.
Jake — even the infuriating, stubborn, Ken doll-ish parts of him — hadn’t been anywhere on that list.
But she’d always found that the best stories were the ones that fell outside of her very thorough research.
“Payback told me you need to get laid.”
Said pilot would be laughing his sorry ass off if he could see the two of them right now, grinning at each other like teenagers who’d just had their first kiss. In fact, he’d probably be shouting obscenities at them, telling them to get a room while Fanboy cackled at his side. Nana could just imagine it, and it made her already immense smile even bigger.
She could hear Jake chuckle against her collarbone, and the sound of it made her shiver.
“Did he now?”
The same three words from earlier. They sounded so different coming out of his mouth now, ghosting over her neck when he didn’t bother to stop leaving what she was sure would be deeply obvious hickies in the morning.
She couldn’t even bring herself to care about that, brain too far gone in the high he’d shotgunned directly into her mouth, dripping down her neck and over her skin, leaving stains on her nice dress so she’d never be able to look at it the same way again. Her mind was somewhere out over the horizon, words being taken over by base desires and the sheer need to chase Jake’s words with her own.
“He did.”
She said it with a laugh, and Jake laughed too, and she had to pull away before the feeling of it made her collapse fully. His mouth on her skin was too much yet not enough, and every other infuriating paradox she could possibly think of, and so she had to stand up straight, nudging Jake until he could see her again, hear her speak.
“Figured I oughta just take care of that while I’m at it.”
She traced a path down Jake’s jaw with one manicured nail, reflective polish glinting off the setting sun. She followed it with her eyes until it completed its journey, where she chucked him under the chin with a smile that was probably as foolishly blissed-out as they came. That was probably the most forward thing she’d ever said, and the haze of kissing Jake was the only thing keeping her from blushing furiously.
A good thing that was, the way she could see his jaw clench the same way his hands did against her waist. The color in his eyes went slack, replaced by blown pupils so large she could see herself in them, and the smile on his face was nothing short of ravenous when he finally made eye contact with her.
She watched as he wriggled in her grip a bit, and she wondered for a brief moment what he could possibly be up to now until one hand left her waist, digging in his pocket until he produced the keys to the Thunderbird.
“I’ll get the car.”